The Victorian Serialized Novel and the Internet Serial As Social

Verge 15 Alyssa Krasnansky The Empathetic Author in the Internet Age: The Victorian Serialized Novel and the Internet Serial as Social Experience Serialization is a publishing practice that has endured in different forms since its rise as the dominant publishing model in Victorian England. Though not by any stretch of the imagination the dominant method of novel publication today, serialization remains present in modern print culture largely as a product of the Internet. In this paper I will argue that three Internet-based forms of serialized fiction—serialized long-form prose (hereafter shortened to web serial), the quest, and the web comic—share several elements with Victorian serial novels. The two contexts share, first, a social community of readers founded around the serial text, and second, direct contact between author and reader. The divergence between modern and Victorian serialized texts lies mainly in the purpose with which the author-reader relationship is manipulated. I will use the term “reader anxiety” to refer to any suspense or tension produced in the reader, the exact nature of which will vary across contexts. In Victorian serials, reader anxiety is necessary for commercial success. While the desire to create suspense for the reader remains in modern serials as well, direct contact with readers is often used to subvert some forms of reader anxiety for the sake of a more enjoyable reading experience. The differences in how Victorian and Internet-based serials form author-reader relationships and encourage or subvert reader anxiety stem in part from the different print cultures from which each originate. In the Victorian context, serialization was the primary model of publishing utilized by the most popular authors of the era, whereas in the context of Internet self-publication, authors use serialization as a means of disseminating subversive work with little prospect of commercial publication. From these vastly different print cultures come Verge 15 Krasnansky 2 vastly different purposes for serialization, and in turn, vastly different social experiences for author and reader. THE VICTORIAN MODEL OF SERIALIZATION Beginning with the publication of the Pickwick Papers in 1836, serialization became the popular mode of novel publication. Never before had time been an element of novel writing, yet with the Pickwick Papers and subsequent serials, time became an inextricable element of Victorian print culture (Allen 36). Serialization transformed the expectations the public had of the novelist, their expectations of the text, and the reading experience itself. Publication in periodicals transformed the English novel as, for the first time, novelists came to be defined as businesspeople, more similar to journalists than artists (Delafield 102). There was no guarantee that a magazine which picked up a novel for publication would not drop it again: that depended upon the popularity of each installment with the magazine’s readers. Serials might be dropped by one magazine and picked up in another, or rushed to a finish in twelve issues instead of twenty due to flagging popularity (Allen 40). The integration of the reader’s appeasement into the process of not only novel publication but the act of writing itself disrupted England’s print culture in the mid-19th century. Genres shifted: novels published in magazines appealed intentionally to the magazine audience. According to one Victorian reviewer, “serial novels should be a ‘conservatory, so to say, of light, and flowers, and perfume, added to a room, into which you may step at pleasure’” (Allen 37). Some Victorians had the opposite preference, and were frustrated by the sentimentality of serial novels. Henry James protested that Anthony Trollope was “inartistic” and “took a suicidal satisfaction in reminding the reader that the story he was telling was only, after all, make- Verge 15 Krasnansky 3 believe” (quoted in Delafield 119). Phrased another way, James took issue with the commercialization and monetization of novel writing. Yet commercialization was the natural result of a mode of publication in close communication with readers about what they wanted in a novel while that novel was still being written. Middlemarch, a later experiment with the serial novel, is a good example of how money influenced its publication. Unlike its predecessors, Middlemarch did not publish in a magazine, but in eight half-volumes, and therefore was free to publish bi-monthly, rather than according to a strict monthly schedule (Payne 122). The reasons for this experiment were, first, an attempt “by the Leweses and Blackwood to escape the power of Mudie’s and other lending libraries, which were by 1871 exacting large discounts on large orders” (Payne 122); second, an attempt by Eliot to sell advertisements in the end-pages; and third, an attempt to increase the likelihood of the novel being reviewed multiple times, which would in turn increase sales (Payne 122). This business-like approach to novel writing is mirrored in how Victorian novelists interacted with the public. For the first time, novelists were not only businesspeople, but celebrities, a shift in persona fostered by the advent of the public reading. The question of the novelist identity is again raised: John Forster, Dickens’ biographer and critic, finds fault in the public reading. He writes: “It was a substitution of lower for higher aims: a change to commonplace from more elevated pursuits; and it had so much character of a public exhibition for money to raise, in the question of respect for his calling as a writer, a question also in respect to himself as a gentleman” (Payne 146). Dickens’ choice to do public readings for profit attracted criticism, but it also created “the new trend towards novelist worship” (Payne 149) which would endure for decades: “George Eliot’s Verge 15 Krasnansky 4 fans [would rush] up to kiss her hand in the same St. James Hall where Dickens delivered nearly all his London readings” (Payne 149). With serialization, the novelist identity became that of a celebrity, but, notably, a celebrity whose status existed at the whim of the reader. If the author did not treat their writing like a commercial good, they were likely to have their status revoked. THE VICTORIAN SERIAL NOVEL AS A SOCIAL EXPERIENCE The close relationship between serialization and commercialization in the Victorian context is a key concept one must keep in mind in the discussion of how the Victorian model of serialization existed as a reading experience inherently more social than volume publication, and which depended heavily upon the cultivation of reader anxiety. Victorian readers approached serialized novels differently than they approached novels read in volume. There was a certain level of intimacy between reader and text that serialization produced. In “The Serialized Novel,” Catherine Delafield writes, “Readers liked the serialization aspect as something ‘friendly,’ the characters regarded as companions almost” (119). The novel, when read in installments over a long period, can understandably be considered a companion—much like a friend, the novel is reencountered regularly, and its next visit anticipated. Further, readers interact with the serial novel over a longer span of time than they would interact with a volume novel; the time waiting in between installments is not time during which the novel is forgotten or set aside, but time during which the reader is engaged imaginatively with the text. In Serialization in Popular Culture, Rob Allen confirms that, “According to critics such as Wolfgang Iser, [temporal delay] led to a deeper imaginative engagement with the novel, especially in terms of readers spending more time imagining Verge 15 Krasnansky 5 possible resolutions to unanswered questions” (35). With the text left half finished, readers naturally engage longer with the text, musing over how it will be resolved. We are given to understand that this level of engagement was a relatively new phenomenon with the advent of the serial novel. Thomas Arnold in 1839 wrote the following about how his students engaged with serialized texts: “The works of amusement published only a few years since were comparatively few in number; they were less exciting, and therefore less attractive; they were dearer, and therefore less accessible; and, not being published periodically, did not occupy the mind for so long a time, nor keep alive so constant an expectation; nor, by dwelling thus upon the mind, and distilling themselves into it, as it were drop by drop, did they possess it so largely, colouring even, in many instances, its very language and affording frequent matter for conversation” (quoted in Allen 34). Rather than read a book all at once, ruminate upon it for a short time, and then occupy their minds with other pursuits, readers of serial novels were instead led to ruminate upon the text during the intervals in between installments and renew their interest again with each weekly or monthly addition. Arnold importantly makes mention of conversation: not only was the personal experience of reading changed by serialization, but the social experience of reading was changed as well. Benedict Anderson terms this experience “imagined community” (Allen 34). Readers of serials, by nature of reading in installments, had in common the experience of long term imaginative engagement, and as a result, “disruption opened a space for a community of readers to discuss, debate and judge the tantalizing possibilities of what might happen next” (Allen 35). Verge 15 Krasnansky 6 The experience of reading a novel is therefore transformed from a solitary experience to a social experience in which readers are aware of their own reading experience as something that is not fixed, but that changes with each installment. At the end of each installment, there is the possibility for satisfaction or dissatisfaction with its resolution. Readers and critics could, if they were dissatisfied (or anxious that they might soon be), address their desires to each other, or, in many cases, to the author directly.

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